space

Are you one of those waiting for the day when space travel is no longer reserved for highly trained astronauts? Well, wait no longer. 2012 may go down in history as the year private industry takes over the race to space—at least America’s part. For a price, individuals can take day trips to space, overnight visits to a space station, book a space hotel—even one near the moon—and if one has the desire for romance, it could soon be possible to get married in space…

Solar Catastrophe Did An Outburst from the Sun End the Last Ice Age and Destroy a Forgotten Civilization? By Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D. The conventional status quo view is that true civilization and high culture dates back to the period of approximately 3500 BC to 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus region. In the early 1990s, my work on the Great Sphinx of Egypt broke this barrier when I demonstrated, using geological data, that the great statue’s origins go back thousands of…

In the twenty years since the discovery of Lake Vostok, the burning—or should we say chilling?—question about the giant sub-glacial body of liquid water has been: will we find life there? In late June of this year the world learned that the definitive answer is a resounding, yes. The enormous lake is, in fact, “teeming” with life. Before the announcement, conventional wisdom has had it that Vostok was probably sterile. It is, after all, very cold and inhospitable down there but once again conventional science…

Doesn’t Drying Mean Cooling? Cold and dry are a set; think of the Poles: Antarctica, the coldest place on earth, is technically a desert, with barely six inches of annual rainfall. Contrapuntally, the world’s rain forests are near the Equator. Water vapor acts as the most effective greenhouse gas, holding in heat. And it works both ways: “Raising temperature … enhances moisture content of the atmosphere” (“The Human Impact on Climate,” Scientific American, Dec. 1999, p. 103). By the same token, forestlands hold in both…

In May of this year, Mars One—the European non-profit organization that aims to send a team of four on a one-way trip to Mars, in 2024—announced the selection of 705 candidates chosen for the daring mission from a pool of 200,000 applicants. The chance to be one of first humans to set foot on the Red Planet, is apparently irresistible to many, even when there will be no chance of return to the home planet. If the Mars One project succeeds, its intrepid voyagers will…

Success has many father; ‘failure’ is an orphan. —Old Proverb In the wake of the success the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, it should come as no surprise that the original idea—that extra-terrestrials have influenced the development of civilization on Earth—is now attributed to many. According to Dr. Gregory Little—researcher, publisher of the online magazine Alternative Perceptions, and regular contributor to Atlantis Rising—who has studied the matter extensively, the ancient astronaut hypothesis has been attributed to everyone from horror writer H.P. Lovecraft to popular astronomer Carl…

The Akashic Field is a metaphysical library that exists outside of time and space. It is thought to be a universal record of everything that has ever happened, a kind of database that a clairvoyant or a mystic could access for healing, vision, or understanding. The idea of an Akashic Field is popular in spiritual and New Age thought as an explanation for intuitive information and spiritual insight. This concept has long been ridiculed by materialistic science, since there is no conceivable way that such…

SIDEBAR: John Anthony West has complained that Ph.D. candidates in Egyptology spend way too much time on subjects like Tutankhamun’s underwear, and far too little on subjects of real significance, like the true meaning of Egypt’s monuments. We end up knowing more and more about less and less, he has argued. The pattern is repeated throughout the entire scientific establishment, as researchers, in order to advance their careers, feel the need to specialize in ever-narrower areas of interest. The smart doctoral candidates politely defer to…

For years Hollywood has romanticized the search for life on planets other than Earth—especially the intelligent kind. Since 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake first attempted to deploy a radio telescope to listen for alien radio signals, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been a key element in many a cinematic story line. Films like Contact, Independence Day, and ET have offered variations on the theme of earnest, if lonely, researchers striving to lead the world to a new interstellar awareness. The reality, however, has…

In a sense, there are really three planets we call Mars. There is the Mars of fiction, of dreams, of imagining. There is Mars as depicted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) based on their own interpretation of the data from their various orbiters and landers. Then there is the ‘real’ Mars—now only dimly perceptible—which appears to lie somewhere between the Mars of fiction and the official version offered by NASA and its allies. Writers of fiction…